Do You Need Friendfeed IM?

For people into Friendfeed, the appeal is the ability to have a pretty complete view of your personal digital landscape – who’s commenting on your digital activity, as well as the digital lives of other people you follow.

There are already lots of ways to monitor Friendfeed – the Web site, a desktop application or via e-mail, but now Friendfeed has unveiled updates via instant messaging. It strikes me as overkill, a feature rolled out because it was technically possible as opposed to demanded.

Here’s a great synopsis by TechCrunch’s Erik Schonfeld:

FriendFeed ultimately is a communication platform, so adding IM was inevitable. But please kill me now. Just the thought of getting a ping every 30 seconds when anyone I follow on FriendFeed decides to Twitter, blog, add a photo to Flickr, share something on Google Reader, or any of the dozens of other actions across the Web FriendFeed monitors is overwhelming. I need less noise in my life, not more noise.

Now, I could be wrong because I’m not a die-hard Friendfeed user. But I’m increasingly convinced we’re being digitally bombarded to the point where it’s getting too much for all but a few completed wired people.

One thing that has kept Twitter and other micro-blogging services so useable and manageable is its simplicity. There aren’t a lot of frills. Sure, you can use Twitter on the mobile Web or use iPhone apps but if you want to ignore Twitter, you can.

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